Although I liked it a lot in Suriname, the Dutch food made me long to go back to Holland even more. Food’s like that: you taste something from your childhood or from home and you just want to go back there. I had to say goodbye to Suriname after only four days in the capital. Time was running out and I had to move on to the “European” part of South America: French Guyana.
French Guyana
The three-day trip to French Guyana will give a good view on a true off-the-beaten-track travel experience. Though most of the life-on-the-road horror is edited out of the book to save pages, here I’ll give you a detailed insight on the shit you can get yourself into while travelling, just so you can’t say I didn’t warn you. I think I said it before but I will say it again. Budget travel will toughen any man up. You’ll need lots of patience, creativity, willpower and persistence.
I left the guesthouse in Paramaribo early in the morning and walked to the bus station. It wasn’t too far, but enough that you got there with a soaking wet sweaty t-shirt. My backpack weighed around twenty-three kilos and was filled with lots of cookies and candy, a hammock I bought at a local market the day before and a liter bottle of water. I bought a ticket and the woman behind the counter informed me the bus would arrive somewhere around 1:00 PM. I had to keep an eye on all the buses going in out the dusty square to make sure I found the right one. I smoked a cigarette and sat down to wait. People at the guesthouse had offered me the tourist taxi to the border, which cost seventy US dollars, but I laughed at them and said I would take the local bus there. A local bus cost only two-and-a-half dollars, so I’d already saved a shitload of money.
A big black woman was breast-feeding her baby right in front of me. I didn’t know where to look because I didn’t want to be rude, being the only white guy there looking at some giant hooters. She had the biggest nipples I had ever seen in my life. They must have been almost an inch long and I was shocked and intrigued at the same time. The woman just smiled a few times when I took a few peeks. The local bus arrived and I found a space next to the window in a single row of seats. The bus had about eighteen seats and drove with all the windows and even the door open.
We drove straight to another and bigger bus station where we had to wait for a while. Some other passengers joined us and the bus was now packed with people. My backpack was in the back of the bus and was big enough that it basically used up a seat. A skinny woman – well, I’m not entirely sure it was a woman, but I think so – wanted me to take the bag on my lap so she’d have more arm space. I refused because I was already packed in between other passengers; the walkway in the middle of the bus had fold-out seats that were now all filled. She started grumping, but I just said no to her.
This bus was overcrowded already and people were eating and drinking, kids were playing on the seats, moms were either yelling at them or breastfeeding them. The skinny woman was on the phone with someone and was cursing. She spoke a mix of Dutch and Neger-Engels, which literally translates to Negro-English, a language used mostly by poor locals. People started arguing with her because she used so many curse words in front of little children. People in Suriname are very polite. At one point she was yelling both on the phone and with people in the bus. This went on for half an hour before she finally shut her big mouth.
I was sitting tight against the side of the bus and the guy next to me stank of old sweat, and he had to lean on me since the guy next to him had lots of bags with him. That guy smelled even worse. The guy next to me was loudly telling funny stories and jokes and everyone laughed. When the bus stopped at a road restaurant, I was incredibly happy to get off the bus and smoke a cigarette. Everyone bought food at the road restaurant and brought it on board, and soon the whole bus smelled of greasy food and old sweat, the kind you get when people sweat a lot, go to bed without a shower and sweat again the next day. The stench was terrible.
The road was only paved for the first hour and the rest was dusty dirt road, so I couldn’t stick my head out of the window anymore to avoid the terrible smell because of the clouds of dust. I had to close the window and suffer. But despite the horrendous conditions, I still like buses like this: taking them means I don’t have to feel like some spoiled tourist who doesn’t experience anything in the country he’s visiting and it gives an insight in the lives of people who don’t have it as good as us back in the west.
We arrived at the border, which was similar to the border of the other Guyana: a river separates the two countries. There’s a ferry, but it only goes across once a day, so I choose to take one of the small fishing boats. Young teenage guys ran up to me and pulled my arm to the boats. It was a fight for customers here. I said I needed an exit stamp in my passport and asked where the immigration office was. They said it was far away but as a European I didn’t need it. Stupidly enough I was in such a dazed mood that I actually believed them and got on one of the small boats with my backpack. There was a French girl on board and halfway on the river she told me I definitely needed a stamp if I was going past the border town and into the country. Great. At least it was a nice river, since I had to go across it three times.
Once across the river I asked the boat guy to take me back to the customs office close to the shore in Suriname. He took me back to the starting point and I had to take a taxi to the customs office. The office was already closed, so the driver took me took to some military dude who exit-stamped my passport. Back into the taxi again and later back into the boat again and by now I had trouble my carrying my backpack around. I was exhausted and the worst was yet to come.
The boat guy was really friendly and luckily he was from Suriname, so I could speak Dutch with him. He dropped me at the shore where the French Guyanan police post was and they stamped me into the country. Back into the boat again, and he dropped me off at the small place where the boats docked. I gave him about fifteen US dollars, which is relatively cheap for all the boating he did for me.
As soon as I was in French Guyana, lots of shady Rasta guys came at me, all wanting to take me somewhere. There were no official taxi and it was already dark by now. There I was, with my full backpack with my money, laptop, camera and cell phone.
I didn’t feel safe at all being surrounded by all these shady guys but the last thing you should do is let them know that. They asked me ridiculous prices, like sixty or seventy dollars, to bring me anywhere in town, even if it was close.
French Guyana is a very expensive country and the hotels listed in the Lonely Planet book were horribly costly. I had to find something else. The Lonely Planet, aka the travelers’ bible, named a guesthouse but didn’t give an address. It just said it was somewhere on the way to some small village named St Jean. I cursed the book for its insufficient information. The friendly boat guy translated for me and one of the guys said he would bring me there for ten Euros. (French Guyana is officially part of France so the local currency is the Euro, which feels weird because it’s thousands of miles away from Europe.) I had to take the risk and went in the car with a guy who didn’t speak anything but French. Except for some funny lines my French is non-existent these days, although I was quite good at it in my early twenties. This guy had a good car, so I trusted him more than the guys who drove clunkers. We stopped at two different ATMs along the way and I was lucky they even worked. He drove in the direction of the village but we couldn’t find a guesthouse at all. I think maybe he drove past it.
At one point we saw some small houses and it looked like it might be the place. We stopped and looked around a bit, looking for a reception or something. Suddenly a woman walked out and asked what we were doing there. I pointed at the guy and he explained a bit in French. I couldn’t understand what he was saying and suddenly the woman started speaking English. I was so relieved at that moment. I told her that we were looking for a guesthouse but she never heard of it. I asked if I could sleep in the bushes with my hammock. She gave me a strange look, thought for a few seconds and said “You can sleep here if you want”. She must have seen the desper
ation on my face. I paid the “taxi” guy ten Euros and he left.
Bea was a French woman working as a nurse, and had two daughters from an earlier marriage with a Brazilian guy. They were divorced now. The oldest daughter was about fourteen and was a bit scared of me but the youngest one was about seven years old and found me very interesting. I had hit the jackpot and was really lucky to meet this woman. Bea cooked some dinner for me and gave me a Heineken beer. She had traveled and hitchhiked herself and was excited to hear about my trip. Of course I left out all the stories about girls. She had prepared a room (with air conditioning) for me and I took a shower and fell asleep around ten o’clock. It had been a very stressful day and I was really exhausted.
The next morning she had to get up very early for work and we ate some breakfast. Afterwards she gave me some extra water and dropped me off at the hitchhikers point in St Laurent de Marconi, the small harbor city I had arrived in the night before. I thanked her extensively for her friendliness.
After spending an hour in the already hot sun trying to get a lift, I gave up and walked back to the harbor which took me about forty-five minutes. I was back where I started. The hawkers/Rastas came to me and asked what I where I was going. I said that I needed a bus to Cayenne, the capital of French Guyana. Because most middle-class people have a car and everyone else tries to hitchhike, there’s no public transport in this country. There are some private drivers, though, and I was led to a guy who could take me there. It cost thirty-five Euros for a four-hour ride. I had paid two Euros for the same distance in Suriname, but here I had no choice and got on the luxury minivan along with a few others. They paid the same as me, so I didn’t feel I was getting ripped off. The prices are just high in this country.
The driver was a very friendly guy who could speak five or six languages. After one hour we had to pass a roadblock and my bag was searched for Surinamese knock-off clothes and my passport was checked by the French cops with their funny hats. The driver dropped us off at some village and we changed buses there.
The new driver wasn’t friendly at all and when we arrived in Cayenne he refused to drop me off in the center. I had to walk a kilometer with my backpack again. The sun was relentless and even though it was around noon I was already ready for a nap.
The cheapest guesthouse was supposed to be next to Palm Square, but it was closed down. A guy pointed me towards the second cheapest option in town and I walked over there. Another half-hour walk.
At the hotel, they said I had to wait till two o’clock to check in. The hotel wasn’t really nice and only a two-star place, but they still asked forty-five Euros (nearly sixty US dollars) a night and it was strictly forbidden to bring a guest. I could forget about getting a flag here. I left my bag next to the desk and told them I would come back later to check in and would visit an Internet café first.
I walked around the city center, took some pictures, went to an Internet café for an hour, took a shameful dump while a cute Chinese girl was sitting on the other side of the door and afterwards went to the local tourist office. Luckily there was a young guy there who spoke some English. I asked him about cheap places to stay the night but he didn’t know anything. I decided to leave Cayenne and go to Kourou, one hour away by bus. He was helpful but I still had to pressure him a lot to call several campsites around Kourou for me, because hotels would cost at least a hundred dollars there. He found one that would take me and explained how to get there. I walked back to the “cheap” hotel to pick up my bag. The staff there gave me a weird look when I just walked in and took my bag and left. I still had to walk quite a distance in the hot sun.
On the way there I bought some chips, cigarettes and a few half-liter cans of beer. I must have left quite a weird impression downing a few beers at four in the afternoon. I arrived at the bus station, where it was hard to get a minivan to Kourou. There were some cute black girls around and I tried to talk to them a bit, but their English was very limited.
People were fighting to get into the vans, but the one to Kourou wasn’t showing up. It took ages to arrive and there were some heated arguments between drivers and passengers. Still, we finally got in and were on our way. There was a Surinamese girl with a baby on the bus and I talked to her a bit as we drove back to Kourou, the place I had passed on my way to Cayenne. For some reason we changed drivers halfway and my deal with the first one to take me off route to the guesthouse didn’t go down well with the other driver. He wanted me to pay five Euros extra, on top of the ten Euros I’d already had to pay. The normal price to center Kourou was five Euros and it wasn’t even that far, although the dirt road to the guesthouse was really bad. Lots of arguing later I gave the guy his extra five Euros and knocked on the door of the campsite/guesthouse.
A friendly native Amazon Indian guy opened the gate and showed me a place to hang my hammock. The only other guests were a French family with a cute daughter. They were very friendly; we talked a bit and when I told them I was going to visit the famous Devil’s Island they offered me a ride in their rental car to the harbor the next morning because they were planning the same. They gave me some food, too, but I didn’t want to take advantage of their friendliness too much. There seemed to be quite a few French tourists visiting French Guyana. It’s super easy for them: they can speak their own language and even pay with Euros while still being thousands of miles away from home. They don’t even need passports.
Around ten o’clock I hung up my hammock and fell asleep quickly. I was glad that I could use the hammock, because it hadn’t really been cheap and it weighed quite a lot and took lots of space in my bag.
The next morning, breakfast consisted of cookies and candy, just like dinner the night before. We all got into the car and went to the harbor. I was able to book a day trip on the same catamaran as the French family and together with a few others we sailed out.
I’d always wanted to go on a catamaran, it’s my favorite type of boat. We were with about fifteen people including the big-bellied captain with a Captain Iglo beard and his wife/girlfriend. She must have been at the end of her forties but still had a good body with big tits loosely bouncing in her shirt. She had long brown curly hair and was sun-tanned all over. Her face wasn’t that attractive but she just had that sort of overall raw attractiveness. Weirdly enough I looked at her more than at the young French chick. You don’t see a sexy older woman every day. Maybe I was just horny after weeks of not scoring a chick and having only one Same Night Lay. Travelling around on a budget and picking up girls is damn hard, especially in countries where attractive girls are a rarity.
Sailing to the Isles de Salut was amazing: the sun was hot, the waters were blue and even the smell of the ocean was good. The catamaran is a magnificent boat and I loved it. The only problem was that of course I got sunburned early in the day. We arrived at the first island and the boat docked.
The Isles de Salut are famous islands because this used to be the island where French prisoners were send in the old days. They are known as Devil’s Island, made famous by the book Papillion and the classic movie with one of my favorite actors, Steve McQueen. If getting send to a tropical island doesn’t sound so bad then know this: over ninety percent of the prisoners there died within six months. The conditions were terrible.
At first I walked around the island a bit with the French family and another Dutch guy but they took a guided tour and I started walking around alone. I saved eight Euros on the tour – it was in French anyway. It was a good decision because I saw so much more on my own, lots of monkeys, wild pigs and some rare lizards too.
A few hours later we were back on the boat and we sailed to another island close by. The boat stopped and we had to swim about a hundred meters to the shore. I barely made it and was ashamed of my terrible physical state. I coughed my lungs out once I had some steady ground under my feet. The young French girl had a very sexy body. Before she’d been wearing some unrevealing clothes but now that I saw her in her swimming gear she looked so amazing… But
what could I do sleeping outside in a hammock with her parents around?
The second island was less interesting and I walked around it twice with the Dutch guy. He was nice, but our views of Holland clashed a bit. He was a lot younger than me and full of idealistic thoughts. He told me that he couldn’t find a place to stay and had to pay a hundred Euros a night for a hotel room in Kourou. I told him that that was insane. I’d rather sleep on the streets than pay that sort of money in a dead-end town like Kourou.
At the end of the day we went back. By now I really was quite sunburned. Normally I don’t mind that so much, but now I had a 23kg backpack scratching the skin off my shoulders.
I stayed one more night in the hammock and left early in the morning. I said goodbye to the Frenchies. The friendly owner of the guesthouse asked me for less money than we’d agreed on and arranged to have me picked up by a friend, who took me in a car to the Guiana Space Center. It cost me ten Euros, but there was almost no other way of getting there since it was in the middle of nowhere.
The Space Center is the base for a partnership between several European countries for the launch of commercial satellites and rockets. When I got there the security people gave me lots of trouble because I arrived there with a full backpack and they wouldn’t let me leave it anywhere. They said I either had to get it off the grounds or take it with me into the museum and surrounding areas. Like I was going to visit a museum with a giant backpack. After I protested for a while they searched my whole bag and decided I could leave it at the reception while I went to the museum and surrounding sites.
After visiting everything I had to find a way back to Suriname. I walked off the Space Center grounds and waited for a lift next to the road. It started raining, but I was lucky: one car stopped after a few minutes and took me in. The driver was a French guy who worked there. As I asked, he took me to the roundabout four kilometers away. Getting out, I saw a poor black guy waiting for a ride too. I asked him where he was going and he told me St. Laurent, the same place I was going to. I walked past him and waited about fifty meters further up the road so that people would take him first. I had made a sign with a piece of cardboard and the marker Bea had given me.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 46
